Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of

the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files.TV.

Houston is not an unusual place for devastating hurricanes, but in the era of climate change disaster, Harvey hit the state like no other. In just six days, 33 trillion gallons of water were dumped onto the area, the greatest amount of rain for a single storm in continental U.S. history, with three times more rain than Katrina.

The catastrophic flooding destroyed thousands of homes

and left many areas of Houston and ruins.

But these homes all have something in common.

Like the devastated neighborhood I visited in northeast Houston,

low-income, black and Latino residential

areas are what is known as fence-line communities, or those in the highest-risk borders of flooding

and pollution.

To learn more, I talked to an expert on fence-line communities, Dr. Robert Bullard, distinguished

professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.

Well, if you look at, you know, Houston is a petro capital,

and it has lots of industries and many of the communities that are near the refineries

and petrochemical plants along the ship channel, many of them are also in the areas that,

that's prone to flood. And so you get this, you know, people who are living in the areas that's affordable,

areas that, because of residential segregation, because of housing discrimination, in many

cases people are forced to live in areas that are risky and very vulnerable, not just to

storms like Harvey or these monster hurricanes, but also just with downpours.

Harvey was different, is that it spread the pain.

You know, it kind of like democratized the suffering, but yet still, you know,

when you look at it, the communities that have few resources

...